Danube Cycle Path: Passau to Vienna

When to go

April to October. May, June and September are the best months: warm, long days, and the apricot orchards of the Wachau in blossom in April or ripe in July. July and August are the busiest and hottest, and the riverside hotels fill early at weekends. From November to March many small guesthouses, bike-hire shops and the little ferries close.

The stops

Interactive map of the route on our site ›

1. Passauone night

   The city of three rivers, where the Inn and the little Ilz meet the Danube. The organ of St Stephen’s Cathedral, with 17,974 pipes, is one of the largest church organs in the world.

2. Engelhartszellstop on the way

   Engelszell Abbey here, founded in 1293, is the only Trappist monastery in Austria, and its monks brew one of the few beers allowed to carry the Trappist name.

3. Schlogenone night

   At the Schlögen loop the Danube turns almost all the way back on itself around a wooded ridge. The remains of a Roman fort of the Danube frontier lie by the river in the village.

4. Linzone night

   Johannes Kepler lived in Linz from 1612 to 1626 and published his Harmony of the World here in 1619, with his third law of planetary motion. The glass Ars Electronica Center stands on the north bank.

5. Mauthausen Memorialstop on the way

   The Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen, a short steep climb from the river, held about 190,000 prisoners from 1938 to 1945, and about 90,000 of them died, many in the quarry with its 186 Stairs of Death. Jews were among them; Simon Wiesenthal was liberated here on 5 May 1945.

6. Greinone night

   The little theatre of Grein, opened in 1791 in a granary of the town hall, is the oldest town theatre in Austria still in use. Below the town begins the Strudengau, once the most feared stretch of the Danube for its whirlpools and rocks.

7. Persenbeugstop on the way

   Persenbeug Castle on its rock over the river is where Karl I, the last emperor of Austria, was born in 1887.

8. Pochlarnstop on the way

   The painter Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn in 1886, and his birth house is now a museum. In the Nibelungenlied, Pöchlarn is Bechelaren, the seat of Margrave Rüdiger.

9. Melkone night

   The yellow Benedictine abbey of Melk was rebuilt in baroque style from 1702 to 1736 by Jakob Prandtauer, high on a rock over the town. Umberto Eco named Adso of Melk, the narrator of The Name of the Rose, after it.

10. Willendorfstop on the way

    The Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figure about eleven centimetres high and some 30,000 years old, was found here in 1908; the original is in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and a large copy stands at the find site.

11. Spitzstop on the way

    The Wachau, the valley from Melk to Krems, has been a World Heritage site since 2000. Spitz sits under the Tausendeimerberg, the hill of a thousand buckets, named for the wine its vineyards were said to yield in a good year.

12. Durnsteinstop on the way

    In the castle above the village, now a ruin, Duke Leopold V of Austria held Richard the Lionheart prisoner in 1192 and 1193 on his way home from the Crusade. The blue-and-white tower of the abbey church is the emblem of the Wachau.

13. Kremsone night

    Krems is one of the oldest towns in Austria, first named in 995. Its Steiner Tor gate dates from 1480, and the Kunstmeile in the old tobacco factory quarter of Stein holds the Caricature Museum and the Kunsthalle.

14. Zwentendorfstop on the way

    The nuclear power station by the path here was finished in 1978 but never switched on: in a referendum that November Austrians voted against nuclear power, and today it is used for training and tours.

15. Tullnone night

    The painter Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in the station at Tulln, where his father was station master; the Egon Schiele Museum in the old district prison on the riverbank tells his story.

16. Klosterneuburgstop on the way

    The Augustinian abbey of Klosterneuburg keeps the Verdun Altar, 51 enamel plaques finished by Nicholas of Verdun in 1181.

17. Vienna2 nights

    The path ends in Vienna. On Judenplatz stands Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial of 2000, a concrete library turned inside out, for the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered by the Nazis, above the excavated remains of a medieval synagogue.

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What it costs

Eighty dollars a night is the room. The bike, the luggage transfer and the train are yours and are not included: bike hire with a one-way drop in Vienna, the bag service between hotels if you take one, the small river ferries that carry bikes across, and the train back from Vienna to Passau. Abbey and museum tickets, such as Melk, are paid on the spot.

What to know

Three things. One: the sign. The whole way follows the Donauradweg, signposted in Austria as the EuroVelo 6 and the green-white Donauradweg signs; there is a path on both banks for long stretches, and you change bank by bridge or by small ferry, which runs only in season and in daylight. Two: the luggage. Several companies carry bags from hotel to hotel on this route and rent bikes with a one-way return in Vienna; check with them before you book, and tell the hotel you arrive by bike. Three: the rooms. In the Wachau and at the Schlögen loop there are few rooms and they go early in summer; book the nights as soon as the dates are fixed.

Roads, tolls and rules

This route has no car. It follows the Danube downstream from Passau on the German border to Vienna, almost all of it on asphalt, flat and away from traffic, on riverside paths and quiet farm roads; the river does the gradient for you, and the only climbs are the short ones up to Mauthausen and to the abbeys if you choose them. Each day is forty to sixty kilometres, so there is time for the sights. Bikes and e-bikes can be hired in Passau, for example at Fahrradklinik Passau by the old town or from Donau Touristik, and handed back at the end in Vienna (or in Klosterneuburg just before it) for a return fee, so there is no need to ride back. The way is marked by Donauradweg signs and is part of EuroVelo 6. Be honest with yourself about the rooms: at the Schlögen loop there are only a few hotels, and in the Wachau in summer a room at eighty dollars is not common; when none is free the site offers two flats at that price instead.

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